Story Time

This is my 100th blog post, and it comes just after my one-year WordPress anniversary. In honor of this momentous occasion, I’d like to tell you a story…

For the past four and a half months, not a day has gone by that I haven’t caught myself marveling about how much I love The Match. He is emotionally intelligent, encouraging, smart, kind, sexy as hell, and so much more. In areas where I fall woefully short, he swoops in with practical help and strategies, and it always seems to work. He loves my children, and they love him. He brings out the goodness in me and makes me want to become the best version of myself. He is my polar opposite in so many ways, yet our differences merely deepen the complex beauty of our relationship. In spite of the list of reasons why I believed no one in their right mind would ever want to date me, he looks at me and sees his best friend, his partner, and the love of his life. And the feeling is mutual.

So on a recent lazy Saturday morning, to the soundtrack of my younger children running noisily down the hall, I rolled over in bed to face him. What am I going to do with these kids?, I asked with a slight smile on my lips. They need to learn to stay put and stay quiet until I get them up. They’re killing my Saturday vibe.

You know what you need? he asked.

What?

You need a husband…someone to come in here and back you up and help get shit straight.

I nodded. He was right. Although I knew marriage wasn’t required, I also understood that our traditional, conservative families would prefer it. And, frankly, I was so deeply in love, they wouldn’t have had to push hard.

I looked him in the eyes and said simply, You’re right. Let’s fucking do this.”

The Match stared at me for a moment, speechless. Seriously?

Yeah. Seriously.

With those four absurdly unromantic words — let’s fucking do this — I had proposed. Oh, how typical of me, to do something so important so utterly in the moment. But I think The Match knows me well enough now to not be surprised by it (though the next night, he did make a point to confirm that I’d been serious). I didn’t have a ring to offer him except the hairband wrapped twice around my thumb, but he told me he didn’t mind at all.

And that, my friends, is that. We’ve picked out and ordered simple, meaningful rings, we’ve told our families (oh, shit…pause — gotta call my sister. Ok, we’re cool), and we’re in “merger negotiations” to sort out the minutiae of combining our lives and closets and furniture and paper clip collections (kidding). The timeline as it stands now is 1-2 years. But the timeline doesn’t matter, really. I sent him this text earlier today after a challenging conversation he had with his dad about us: All I know is that we’re more deeply connected than marriage already. That label (of marriage) is more culturally understood than “partner” but somehow lacks the depth to describe our relationship. “You are my partner” holds more meaning than “you are my husband.”

As for my writing…I have some ideas for the content on this blog, plus a few exciting new writing projects floating around in my head. But 100 posts feels like an appropriate time to hit the indefinite pause on The Year of Living Promiscuously. It’s also a time to celebrate. Because I would not have anticipated this. Sometimes life is so grandly generous, and in the face of such generosity, I feel floored…and humbled…and profoundly grateful. For those who have read and commented. For the forty (or forty six, or whatever — who’s counting, right?) and for my real-life cheerleaders who prophesied success over me when I was at my most self-deprecating. And for The Match, whose presence in my life is so foundational that I struggle to recall what sort of unanchored existence I had before him. Thank you, everyone. I’ll keep you posted on what’s next.